Poor Little Buttercup
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Poor Little Buttercup The Hollywood version of a CIA wise man. by John Podhoretz In The In-Laws, the uproarious 1979 comedy, dentist Alan Arkin spots a photograph of John F Kennedy on the office...
...The captivating and haunting mystery of James Angleton goes unexplored in the portrait of Edward Wilson offered by Eric Roth and Robert De Niro...
...Wilson goes to Miami to see a Jewish gangster who isn't named Meyer Lan-sky but might as well be...
...He was a brilliant man who was both gifted and cursed by a chess player's mind capable of perceiving a million different permutations resulting from any single action...
...This revelation of the Soviet Union's harm-lessness occurs, by the way, at some point in the 1950s—you know, around the time the Soviets exploded a nuclear device and crushed the Hungarian rebellion and helped Fidel Castro to take over an island 90 miles off America's shore...
...says Arkin...
...Like all WASPs, according to Roth, Wilson has no idea what real fun is...
...The character of Edward Wilson is based on James Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence chief...
...He just doesn't want to roll in the hay with his wife—a wife who looks and sounds just like Angelina Jolie...
...The movie ends with Wilson walking down a lonely corridor to the strains of "Poor Little Buttercup...
...He spends his free time putting miniature boats inside bottles instead of romping in the sack with his wife, who happens to be Angelina Jolie...
...Peter Falk's character is a complete lunatic—he claims to have seen tse-tse flies the size of eagles carrying Guatemalan babies off to their doom in their beaks—but at least he is decent company...
...Wilson, too, is credited in this movie with the Bay of Pigs scheme...
...That referred to the Bay of Pigs...
...Best, Jack...
...That's more than you can say for Edward Wilson, Matt Damon's character in The Good Shepherd...
...It holds your attention for more than two-and-a-half hours, and that's saying something...
...says Falk...
...When he joins a secret society at Yale, he doesn't enjoy rolling around in the mud naked with his fellow Skull and Bones guys, either...
...by John Podhoretz In The In-Laws, the uproarious 1979 comedy, dentist Alan Arkin spots a photograph of John F Kennedy on the office wall of rogue CIA agent Peter Falk with a handwritten message: "To Vince: At least we tried...
...The trick is not to get killed...
...The Bay of Pigs," Arkin replies...
...That was my idea...
...Unable to speak falsehoods, the defector informs Wilson that the Soviets pose no threat, that nothing works inside the Soviet Union, and that the only reason for the Cold War is the enrichment of the military-industrial complex...
...they can't show any love to Angelina Jolie, but give them a little glimpse of a pointless but expensive weapons system and they get all weak in the knees...
...The benefits are fantastic...
...John Podhoretz, a columnist for the NewYork Post, is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...
...But whatever Angleton may have been— The Good Shepherd Directed by Robert De Niro and I incline toward the view that he became so haunted by the "wilderness of mirrors" in which he found himself trapped that he ended up as something perilously close to a paranoid schizophrenic—he certainly wasn't a dullard...
...But it's undone by its central premise...
...He goes abroad for the entirety of World War II, and when he returns home to Washington he has a five year-old son who doesn't know him and is afraid of him, and he has a new intelligence agency to start...
...Even when he's dressed in drag as a Yale student in 1939 singing "Poor Little Buttercup" with the Whiffenpoofs, he looks like he swallowed a lemon...
...And in another eerie parallel with The In-Laws, Wilson lets loose a bunch of locusts on the Guatemalan tobacco crop (although, unlike the tse-tse flies in The In-Laws, the locusts in The Good Shepherd are not "protected against pilferage under the provisions of the Guacamole Act of 1917...
...It would have been better if it had ended with a voiceover of Peter Falk in The In-Laws telling a New York cabbie about the glories of the CIA: "Are you interested in joining...
...He's simply a quiet nightmare vision of the WASP ascendancy as imagined by an Oscar-winning Jewish screenwriter and an Oscar-winning Italian-American actor-director...
...Arkin asks...
...If he had been colorless and dull and easily gulled, like Edward Wilson, he wouldn't have turned the CIA upside down in the 1960s in pursuit of a high-ranking Soviet agent who almost certainly never existed—and he wouldn't have become an object of fascination for CIA-obsessed writers on both the right and left for many decades...
...And they may be completely inexpressive, but if they meet a Jew you can be sure they're going to say something anti-Semitic...
...Have you ever seen Angelina Jolie...
...You know those WASPs...
...This offer comes at a very good time, because he has just gotten married to Angelina Jolie and if he stayed he might have to share a bed with her, and who could possibly want that...
...That's the key to the benefit program...
...That new intelligence agency is entirely unnecessary, as we learn later when Wilson has a Soviet defector tortured and drugged with truth serum...
...The screenwriter of The Good Shepherd, Eric Roth, had an idea...
...What did that inscription mean...
...You were involved in the Bay of Pigs...
...You win some, you lose some," shrugs Falk...
...The Bay of Pigs," says Falk...
...Involved...
...Not that he goes another way or anything...
...He asks Wilson why he behaves the way he does, and Wilson replies, "It's our country, and the rest of you are visiting...
...He may be a crook, but at least he worries about his grandchildren getting a sunburn, which is more than you can say for Wilson and his son...
...The Good Shepherd isn't exactly a bad movie...
...His idea was that the CIA's obsession with secrecy is the result of the repressions visited upon impressionable young White Anglo Saxon Protestants like Wilson, whom we follow from his college days in the late '30s until the early 1960s...
...Wilson is recruited out of Yale to join the fledgling Office of Strategic Services...
...And despite its dogmatically leftist assault on the idea that the United States has ever had anything to defend itself from, it does manage to convey the head-spinning complexities of a life devoted to spying and counter-spying and counter-counter-spying...
...It's extremely well acted, as you might expect from a film directed by Robert De Niro...
...He spends his entire life scowling...
...That WASP repression is certainly a powerful force...
Vol. 12 • January 2007 • No. 17
